Monday, 26 October 2015

This week— trouble on Mount Helicon! In another poem
unearthed during data entry for A
collection of miscellany poems, the poet Thomas Brown attacks the
unspecified ‘Mr. D’ for his abuses against poetry, the classical tradition, and
(worst of all) of Englishness itself:

1.

Thou Cur, half French,
half English Breed,

Thou Mungril of Parnassus,

To think tall lines run up to feed

Shou’d ever tamely pass us.

2.

Thou write Pindarics, and be damn’d,

Write Epigrams for Cutlers;

None with thy Lyrics can by shamm’d

But Chambermaids and Butlers.

3.

In t’other World expect dry blows,

No tears can wipe thy stains out;

Horace will pluck
thee by the Nose,

And Pindar beat
thy brains out.

The vision of violent poetic justice
at the pearly gates is a rather pleasing one, as is the reimagining of the doggerel-writer
as a literal dog. Nevertheless, this is something of a case of the pot calling
the kettle unpoetic: if Thomas Brown really is the author here (as two
miscellanies claim), then he is not himself above a down-stoop to the jejune*
ballad meter and all of its attendant levity. Worse still, the
second-line/fourth-line rhymes of each quatrain are disyllabic, that is to say weak
or, if you’re feeling misogynistic, ‘feminine’. To my ear they are each so
forced that I hope for the author’s sake that this is a cunning meta-poetic
joke; an attempt to beat the dreadful rhymer at his own unsubtle game.

Perhaps it is inevitable that, in
the competitive pursuit of literary fame, one bard will readily rage against a
rival. Almost as inevitable as the fact that ‘cutlers’ in the second line of
stanza two sets up the rhyme for ‘butlers’ at the end.

What the DMI tells us so far:

The poem appears in four miscellanies, from 1699
to 1736.

The first two are from near-identical editions
of A Collection of Miscellany Poems,
Letters &c. By Mr. Brown..., 1699 and 1700. Here, the poem is
attributed to the poet Thomas Brown (bap. 1663, d. 1704).

After the 1700 edition of Brown’s poems, ‘To Mr
D’ appears again in two more miscellanies, The
Merry Companion or, a cure for the spleen, (1730) and A Collection of Merry Poems, (1736).

Its title is originally listed as ‘To Mr. D----
upon his most incomparable Ballads, call’d by him Lyric Odes.’ Later, the full
surname is added: ‘To Mr. D’Urfey, upon his incomparable Ballads, called by him
Lyrick Odes.’ It may not be a coincidence that later addition appears published after Brown’s death (in 1704), in the collections of 1730 and 1736 respectively.